Building the moon: Finding peace in the midst of good-byes

“Everything is temporary”.

I marvel at how much I truly believe those words. I believe them in the depth of my soul. Everything in this world is temporary.

This thought comes from an entire early life of experiences. When, at age 10, I moved from Virginia to Uganda, my whole life was shaken up. In 2004, Uganda didn’t exactly have high speed internet, so even email was a challenge sometimes. Plus, I had lost my entire culture and cultural reality.

As a kid, my friends came and went. One day I would be making a close friend, and literally the next day she would have disappeared from my life—and I would never see her again.

Moving back to the US when I was 18 brought similar changes. I found that I didn’t know anyone, or even my own culture. I was truly by myself in a very strange country.

This isn’t meant to be a sob story. This isn’t meant to get your sympathy. This is meant as a preface.

A few weeks ago, I was discussing this good-bye phenomenon with someone. I realized just how much I believe that everything is truly temporary.

Last night I went out with my camera at dusk. With my 200mm lens, I took pictures of the moon with Mt. Rainier right there. In the foreground is a building with a light on, and a piece of construction.

What struck me is this: everything that we build is temporary. If I just turn the building’s light off, there will be darkness. If I cut some wires, the equipment would fail. A building would never be built, simply because of one action I made. If you build with something so capricious , then your surely darkness will win.

But you can’t really turn off the moon. At least, humans can’t.  And you can’t really knock down a mountain.  These things stand and orbit and never disappear.

The strength of the mountain radiates this hope—this promise—that some day we can find stability. A promise that God never fails. A promise that what God makes cannot be destroyed by a simple “good-bye”.

I love that these pictures were taken at dusk. Even in semi-darkness, the mountain is visible, and the moon illuminates your way.

No airplane can possibly fly so far that we out-run eternal truths or goodness.  I guess the only thing left to do is to actually look at the beauty.